Excellent review. However on reading through it, the overall impression I took away was that the game fell short more often then it succeeded. Far, far away from your must have game synopsis.

What I'm taking away is limited linear game play, no real impact based on choices beyond quest selection. Average controls, some spotty level design and overall just kinda a gimmick RPG because you can turn into a Dragon.

The bug is triggered when you overwrite a saved game via any mechanism, including quicksave. When you do that, it somehow loses your location, the savegame is permanently corrupted, and when you try to use it all of the doors in the world disappear so you can't progress, forcing you to load an earlier save.

I lost several hours of play to this bug last night and am honestly pretty ticked off about it.

We have indeed been able to reproduce the issue and will try to work out a solution as soon as possible.

As most people have pointed out, the workaround for now is quite simple:

- if the save you are loading is an autosave (this automatically overwrites the previous autosave), then quit to dashboard and load it, it will not give you any problems then.
- Try to make new savegames instead of constantly overwriting one savegame. The problem does not occur if you do not overwrite.
- If you do run out of savegame space (limit is 20), simply go back to dashboard when an overwritten savegame is giving you problems.

We apologize for any inconvenience this caused and hope to resolve this soon.

So if you use common sense and keep several save games in play this shouldn't be an issue. But it is apparently known.

I played the demo on the 360 and I noticed the stuttering there big time both in cut scenes and in regular play.

After playing through the demo. It had a great sense of been there done that and did nothing to draw my interest. Graphics were Fable-esque. Combat was purely button mashing and not really interesting. It's not a terrible game. But really beyond the promise of being able to turn into a dragon nothing in the game felt new.

That being said the overall graphics were good and the world had a nice look to it. The voice acting and syncing of character models to what they were saying was well done. It's a far more better looking game then Dragon Age. But rap-a-tap-tap combat just gets dull. Fable (the first fable) really nailed down that kind of combo system. It was awesome. I really regret they dumbed it down in Fable II.

Isn't this a third-person game rather than a first-person, y'know, since first-person means you see the world through the character's eyes. I would have much loved a first-person camera mode to be able to see better when looking for all the hidden switches and little trinkets the game has everywhere - in fact the lack of it is my biggest complaint to the degree where I'd gladly paid a few more dollars for one.

At the beginning of 2010, I think we (as an industry and as an audience) had not yet started making the distinction between 'first-person' and 'third-person over-the-shoulder'. It had the mechanics of a first-person shooter, rather than a fighter, so it got chalked up there.

Now, of course, everyone has realized that whether or not the character can be seen in the frame makes a huge difference to some people.